America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (3 page)

Furthermore, he reveled in the odd angle, the small incident, the ordinary person, topics not often considered by most journalists to be “stories.” Once again trying to explain his penchant for journalism, he stated in a 1965 open letter to writer Max Lerner why he “succumbed to the fatal itch and joined the gaggle of columnists”:

 

Finally, there is an urgency about many of his social pieces—particularly, of course, America and Americans, his last work of nonfiction. He didn't preach, but he cared. Behind reporting things as he saw them, focusing on the small but telling experiences in life, he was also a moralist and idealist. All his life he was essentially an idealist; that is, he searched to find the essence of things, the meanings or patterns behind what he observed. That's what he was doing as his life came to an end—interpreting America.

Perhaps it was his experience in California's Central Valley during the 1930s, working out of his old bread truck so as to not draw attention to himself, mingling with the migrants, that set the pattern for a lifetime of reporting. He looked away from himself, observing the commonplace and the common people in order to see the whole picture as a democratic vista as accurately as he could. This is precisely Casy's stated mission in The Grapes of Wrath as he joins up with the Joads for the trip to California. Steinbeck lived that mission throughout his career—to see the whole as clearly as possible and to see it with his heart as well as with his head.

I.

PLACES OF THE HEART

EXTRAORDINARILY SENSITIVE to his environment, John Steinbeck “brings together the human heart and the land,” to borrow a phrase from environmentalist and writer Barry Lopez (Lopez 71). Like Lopez, Steinbeck urges his readers to consider two primal landscapes: external landscapes—our relations to the land, to oaks, to the whir of night frogs—and interior landscapes, often shaped by the places where we reside. Some of Steinbeck's best nonfiction considers the writer's internal landscapes, places he lived and loved: Salinas, California, where he was born in 1902 and lived until age eighteen; San Francisco, where he resided briefly during the 1920s; the Monterey Peninsula, where he wrote his early fiction from 1930 to 1936; and the East Coast—New York City and Sag Harbor—where he spent the last eighteen years of his life.

His reflections on these places are sometimes meditative and serious, as in “A Primer on the '30s” and in that marvelous piece “Conversation at Sag Harbor.” But more often his view is colored with humor, a humor that is sometimes impish, sometimes touched with irony. Always we sense the connection of the writer to the places he lived. To a certain extent these pieces form a kind of autobiography, and considering how badly he was treated by some people in both Salinas and Monterey (where the landlord of an office building wouldn't rent him space after he returned to live on the peninsula in 1944) and how terrible was his struggle during his first experience in New York, they are remarkably free of bitterness.

The Salinas valley, twenty miles inland, and the Monterey Peninsula, where his parents had a beach cottage, have become “Steinbeck Country” because so much of his fiction is located there or nearby. Few writers have put such an indelible imprint on a region. Tourists often visit the area to see it not for what it is but for what Steinbeck made of it. But as is clear from “Always Something to Do in Salinas,” the author had mixed emotions about his hometown. Although it was a fine place for a boy to roam the countryside on his pony, the community's conservatism chafed. As he got older, the town's puritanical respectability and antilabor biases grated increasingly—although he could in retrospect treat the rigidity of the Salinas burghers with some levity. In opposition to Salinas, he set up Monterey as more relaxed and diverse, a place more tolerant of both bohemians and ne'er-do-wells. The whole peninsula, he wrote in the mid- 1940s, “has a soul which is lacking in the east” (SLL 28). In particular, he loved Monterey's Cannery Row, a street of fish canneries, warehouses, bordellos, groceries, and fishermen's shacks—a place throbbing with life. Surprisingly, when asked in 1957 to write about redevelopment of the abandoned canneries and warehouses—the sardine industry had collapsed in 1948—he did not endorse nostalgia. He recommended that “young and fearless and creative architects” be hired “to design something new in the world, but something that will add to the exciting beauty” of the Pacific coastline. Steinbeck would later mourn changes in his native turf, but he was realistic about the need for evolutionary growth (Monterey Peninsula Herald, 8 Mar. 1957).

His time in San Francisco was relatively short. As his memoir recalls, “The City,” as most northern Californians referred to it, was the place where, when he was young, his mother took him for culture—the opera, museums, the theater. His nostalgic memories of his bohemian life in the city as an adult are based on the nearly two years he spent there in the late 1920s, when he relocated to be near his future wife, Carol, who worked as a secretary for the Schilling spice company. His nights on the town with her were idyllic, but he fails to mention his long hours of muscling bales of hemp in a bayfront warehouse. He would never fully embrace urban life. Yet his appreciation of the other great city where he lived for a number of years, New York, suggests that he could adapt and become attached to nearly any environment: “When you really live in New York,” he writes to his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, “it is more rural than country. Your district is a village and you go to Times Square as once you went to San Francisco” (SLL 456). Settled there, first in the early 1940s, permanently from 1950 on, he sometimes embraced it wholeheartedly. “New York is everything,” he wrote for a radio broadcast in 1955. “It is tireless, and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than any place else” (The Saturday Review, 26 Nov. 1955).

But city life, no matter how enthusiastic his boosterism, was not fully satisfying to a man who needed space, contact with the land, access to the sea. In particular he missed the ocean, the smell of it, the seabirds, and the people who ran boats out to fish. “We have an urban civilization,” remarked Arthur Miller, “and John was not an urban man. He liked to think he was sometimes. . . . He was trying to find a community in the United States that would feed him, toward which he could react in a feeling way, rather than merely as an observer or a commentator. And I don't know if there is such a place left in the world” (Benson 701-2). With his third wife, Elaine, Steinbeck found in the old whaling village of Sag Harbor on Long Island a place reminiscent of Monterey, a place he could respond to “in a feeling way.” In 1954 they bought a small cottage located on a point overlooking a cove of the bay. They weatherized it so that it could be used in the winter, and it became more than a summer home. They made friends, and Steinbeck could wear his old clothes and his sailor's cap, and could walk to town for morning coffee. He bought a boat—several boats in time—and would fish, or pretend to fish, with his two boys, agent Shirley Fisher, and guests to the cottage. In Sag Harbor, Steinbeck could shed his fame, talk to the locals, read, spend endless hours inventing small innovations, sail on the bay, and, of course, write in the tiny octagonal study that he had built for himself on the point, “Joyous Garde.” “Out here,” he wrote his editor at Viking, Pascal Covici, “I get the old sense of peace and wholeness” (Benson 784).

Steinbeck's essays on the places he cared about serve as a kind of memoir, testimony to one of the most endearing qualities of Steinbeck's prose, his attachment to place.

EARLY MEMORIES of Salinas are so confused in my mind that I don't know, actually, what I remember and what I was told I remembered. I am fairly clear on the earthquake of 1906. My father took me down Main Street and I remember brick buildings, spilled outward. Our own wooden house was not injured, but the chimney had completely turned around without falling. And my sharpest memory is that a phonograph we had obtained by subscribing to the San Francisco Call for two years—our first talking machine—leaped from a shelf and destroyed itself. There were two thousand five hundred people in Salinas then, but boosters confidently predicted that it would someday be a metropolis of five thousand.

Tradition was strong in Salinas and my town never forgot nor forgave an injury. For example, in the Fourth of July hosecart race in 1900, run against Watsonville, the Salinas team ran out its hose smartly and with a substantial lead, then found to its horror that the threads of the coupling had been filed smooth. They could not couple up and get water and so lost the race. Watsonville had obviously cheated. For a decade after, a man could get a fight in a bar at any time simply by bringing up the subject. I thought of Watsonvillians as foreigners and cheats. I wouldn't have thought of trusting them.

The old Camino Real, the royal road that threaded California together, moved up the valley and did not come near Salinas for a very good reason. The place that was to become Salinas was a series of tulegrown swamps, which toward the end of the summer dried and left a white deposit of alkali. It was this appearance of salt that gave the place its name. The stagecoaches on the royal road stopped at Natividad, a pleasant little town on the higher ground of the Gabilan foothills, free of fog and swamp and mosquitoes, protected from the fierce daily winds which funneled up the valley center. Natividad had a small college, perhaps the first in California.

There is no understanding the impulses of humans. Someone built a blacksmith shop in the swamp and houses clustered around it: Main Street went in, and little bridges were built over the dark and noisome swamps. On this least likely site, Salinas grew while Natividad died. The adobe college lost roof and windows. The royal road became a country lane. By the time I came along much of the swamp had been filled in, but there was plenty left so that the night roared with frogs. I was pretty big before I learned that silence was not made up of a wall of frog song.

Salinas was never a pretty town. It took a darkness from the swamps. The high gray fog hung over it and the ceaseless wind blew up the valley, cold and with a kind of desolate monotony. The mountains on both sides of the valley were beautiful, but Salinas was not and we knew it. Perhaps that is why a kind of violent assertiveness, an energy like the compensation for sin grew up in the town. The town motto, given it by a reporter ahead of his time, was: “Salinas is.” I don't know what that means, but there is no doubt of its compelling tone.

As the swamps were drained and the black odorous mud exposed, it became known that this land was rich beyond belief. And Salinas became rich, the richest community per capita, we were told, in the entire world. I suppose this was true. Certainly we Salinians never questioned it even when we were broke. It was a town of wooden frame houses, the trading center of the valley, the social center of the whole world as we knew it.

The social structure was a strange and progressive one. First there were the Cattle People, the First Families of the Salinas Valley, gentry by right of being horsemen and dealing in gentry's goods, land and cattle. Theirs was an unassailable position, a little like that of English royalty. Then Claus Spreckels came from Holland and built a Sugar Factory (in capitals) and the flatlands of the valley around Salinas were planted to sugar beets and the Sugar People prospered. They were upstarts, of course, but they were solvent. The Cattle People sneered at them, but learned as every aristocracy does that not blood but money is the final authority. Sugar People might never have got any place socially if lettuce had not become the green gold of the Valley. Now we had a new set of upstarts: Lettuce People. Sugar People joined Cattle People in looking down their noses. These Lettuce People had Carrot People to look down on and these in turn felt odd about associating with Cauliflower People. And all the time the town stretched out—the streets extended into the country. Farmland became subdivisions. Salinas became five thousand and then ten thousand. Enthusiasts thought that twenty thousand was not too high a mark to shoot at. We had a brick high school and a National Guard armory for dances. And we had the rodeo in the summer to attract tourists.

This celebration had started as a kind of local competition. One's uncles and even athletic aunts entered the roping contests. The ranch-men from the valley in the foothills rode in on saddles decorated with silver, and their sons demonstrated their skill with unbroken horses. Then gradually the professionals moved in and it became “show business.” A working cowman hadn't time to attain the circus perfection of the professionals and soon even the wild horses and the Brahma bulls were imported, and cowboy clowns, who moved from show to show, took the places of the sons of Lynches and Abernathys and Bardins.

I remember Salinas best when it had a population of between four and five thousand. Then you could walk down Main Street and speak to everyone you met. Tom Meek the policeman, and Sheriff Nesbit, Jim Bardin, Mr. Pioda, manager of the Sugar Factory, and any one of a multitude of Hugheses. The generations of Portuguese and Swiss and Scandinavians became American so that the names of Tavernetti and Sveresky and Anoitzbehere and Nissen no longer sounded foreign to our ears.